In today's digital society organizations depend on having ready access to their data. Data, however, can be lost in a variety of ways such as through accidental deletion, data corruption, disasters and catastrophes (e.g., fires or flooding), media failures (e.g., disk crash), computer viruses, and so forth. Thus, it is important to backup data in the event that the data needs to be restored. An organization may have an immense amount of data that is critical to the organization's operation. Backing up data and subsequently recovering backed up data, however, can involve large amounts of computing resources such as network bandwidth, processing cycles, and storage due to the complexity and amount of data to be backed up and restored when needed.
For example, a database, such as a Microsoft Exchange database, can be several hundred gigabytes or many terabytes in size. Backing up such a large file can take a very long time. As a result, in some organizations will implement protection strategies involving a mix of full and partial backups. The database itself may be backed up weekly, such as on a Sunday or other day with low demand, while the associated database transaction logs are backed up daily. This process can help to speed the backup process because data in the database itself is not backed up as part of the daily backups. The restore procedures for such a protection strategy, however, is a multi-stage restore involving restoring a full backup followed by a number of partial backups. As such, restores can be very slow and complex.
Therefore, there is a need for data protection techniques that address both backup performance and recovery performance.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions. EMC, Data Domain, Data Domain Restorer, and Data Domain Boost are trademarks of EMC Corporation.